I’m saying that the quantity of loci must be such that are statistically representative of the entire genome.

Perhaps this is just my limitation, but what percentage of sampled loci must correspond before the genetic clustering is considered valid? Even though only a miniscule quantity of loci end up breaking down along a aggregate level (while most vary on a individual), this would not seem to debunk the group breakdown. Most of the race-valid scientists do not deny that this grouping accounts for an unbelievably small quantity of the polymorphisms, but if the clustering keeps repeating for subjects being sampled, it would be biologically significant.

I’m curious, how many polymorphisms are accounted for by familial groupings compared to polymorphisms caused by random individual variation?

Are you saying that they knew in advance what loci would cluster along their predetermined racial groups and so chose them to confirm their initial assumption?

As far as I can see, this is what they did. They choose loci whose alleles differed in frequency between the predetermined racial groups, then combined them in order to recover those predetermined racial groups.

I’m not suggesting that there was ill intent on the part of the researchers.

Are you saying that the clustering loci must reach a certain quantity in order for the grouping to be valid? Or you are saying that there is a comparable amount of clustering loci along groupings totally discordant with traditional racial ones, and this therefore invalidates the conclusion?

I’m saying that the quantity of loci must be such that are statistically representative of the entire genome. As to how many clustering loci are rquired for the grouping to be valid, I don’t know.

I’m not saying that there is a comparable amount of discordantly-clustering loci, but if there were, then this would challenge the traditional racial breakdown.

Did you look at my other cite? As I said, it addresses most of my conserns, though I’d still like to know how the base set loci were choosen, and how the individual subjects were chosen.

It’s probably the case the the majority of the polymorphisms will not turn out substantial clusters because the majority of human variation is individual, as we know. Are you saying that the clustering loci must reach a certain quantity in order for the grouping to be valid? Or you are saying that there is a comparable amount of clustering loci along groupings totally discordant with traditional racial ones, and this therefore invalidates the conclusion?

What exactly do you mean by “in its entirety”?

The analysis needs to be repeated using a sufficient number of loci randomly chosen from the polymorphic part of the genome to be representative of the entire genome.

The key point is that the sample must be of sufficent size, and chosen randomly in order to be representative. This is true of sampling generally, not just this particular application.

There are obvious physical differences within the races. The Hotentots are physically very different from the Pigmies. If you take the average height of blacks (after adjusting for nutrition) and find that it’s greater than whites, does that mean that blacks are taller than whites? Or does it mean that Hottentots are more numerous than pigmies? If Zulus are on average about the same height as whites, does that mean that they’re more closely related to whites than to pigmies?

It depends upon which physical characteristis you regard as important. And that’s a social decision.

You seem to be sounding the independence-of-trait objection to biological group classification. John Maynard Smith seemed to address the same problem when discussing which traits determine cladistic, genera or species lines:

There is a sense in which the grouping together of different species into genera, families and so on is an artificial procedure. It is of practical importance that every animal and plant should have a scientific name, and this requires that each should be placed in a genus; it will sometimes be a matter of opinion which genus should be chosen. For example, should the cheetah be placed in a genus of its own, Acinonyx, because its claws are non-retractile, or included in the genus Felis because in other respects it closely resembles the other cats? However, even though the decision on such questions may be determined by convenience or individual taste, the classification of animals into higher categories is not therefore wholly an arbitrary procedure. For example, it is generally agreed that the lion should be classified in the same genus as the tiger, leopard, and wild cat, and not in the same genus as the camel, although the latter classification could be supported on the grounds that the two animals are the same colour. Why should we base our classification on the common possession of retractile claws, and not on fawn coloration? The reason is not, as is sometimes thought, that resemblances of colour are in themselves trivial, and resemblances of structure fundamental. It is rather that a lion and camel have little in common except for their colour, and for the characters associated with their both being mammals, whereas the various kinds of cats resemble one another closely in the details of their limbs, backbones, skulls, teeth, viscera, and so on, differing only in coloration, size, and minor changes in proportions. Thus retractile claws are a better guide to classification than colour, because they are associated with a whole number of other characters, whereas animals which are the same colour may have little else in common. The recognition in particular cases of characters which are the valuable guide to classification depends on a study of the group in question.

-The Theory of Evolution, p. 39-40

Humans are not different genera or species, but the problem of selecting which aggregate differences would constitute classification seems to apply to inter-species and intra-species groups. Maynard Smith’s defense of trait selection seems to resemble some sort of correlation argument, like Edwards does.

The analysis needs to be repeated using a sufficient number of loci randomly chosen from the polymorphic part of the genome to be representative of it in it’s entirety. I don’t know whether this has been done.

What exactly do you mean by “in its entirety”?

Naw, it’s just for fun.

It also gives me pleasure to argue with liberals.

That’s your political agenda.

That’s not true!

It also gives me pleasure to argue with liberals.

So a grand total of 13 scientists

Here’s a longer list of dissenters.

Singing: “I’m a better climate-change sceptic than Robert…”

For the rest, I’m just going to link to this handy Wikipedia article that I wish I had originally linked to.

Which itself links to This Wikipedia article. (I wouldn’t have chosen Wikipedia as a source myself, but you opened this particular can of worms, so you can have no complaint if I feed them to you.)

These two articles between them confirm exactly what Barry and I have been saying. There is a consensus that global warming is occurring due to man’s activity. And there is some dissent from that view. I note that the first part of the proposition does indeed appear to enjoy a unanimity.

Not all of the dissenting scientists listed can be considered respectable opinion. Frederick Seitz for example, was considered “not sufficiently rational to offer advice” even to the tobacco industry. Seitz and S. Fred Singer are President and Chair respectively of the Science and Environmental Policy Project whose views on the subject have been comprehensively rebutted. Singer has also been been employed as Scientific reviewer by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution – a well-known and discreditted rent-an-opinion propaganda outfit.

I’m not saying everyone on the list can be dismissed. Nothing I’ve seen suggests that Lindzen, for example is anything other than respectable. However it ought to be clear that there are obvious agendas at work on both sides.

But neither Barry nor I have referenced agenda’d politicians or environmental groups in support of our positions. I base mine upon what I read in science magazines. You’ve insinuated these to be agenda driven but you’ve offered not a shred of evidence that the picture of scientific consensus painted by them is inaccurate or incomplete. Instead you’ve adopted a strawman ‘unanimity’ standard of ‘consensus’ that not even Newton’s laws of motion have been able to meet.

Maybe the consensus is wrong. Maybe the dissenting voices are correct. The problem for me is that I can’t adjudicate the competing claims. I have neither the time to investigate nor the ability to evaluate them. If I did, I’d be a climate expert myself. Neither do you. Neither does Barry. And neither does George Bush. Given our respective lacks of expertise, the rational approach is to accept the consensus view – the centre of mass about which respectable opinion is clustered, while recognising that there are a small number of respectable dissenting voices. That is what Barry and I are doing.

What you and George Bush are doing, is giving inordinate weight to the dissenting voices for no other reason than that it suits your political agendas to do so. That is not rational.

Edit: spelling, minor wording, and link borking.

…you’re right that the solar output doesn’t account for the variation in the very recent past.

Thank you for conceding that.

For the rest, I’m just going to link to this handy Wikipedia article that I wish I had originally linked to.

So a grand total of 13 scientists – not all of whom are in a relevant field, not all of whom actually disagree with the current scientific consensus, and two of whom are with an anti-global-warming think tank that until recently was arguing that warming is a myth. And that’s all they could find.

I stand by my previous statement about the difference between unanimous opinion and scientific consensus.

For the rest, I’m just going to link to this handy Wikipedia article that I wish I had originally linked to.

If solar output and global temperatures are tightly correlated, and humans have left a large footprint on global climate, then either 1) the tight correlation between solar output and global temperature is a coincidence, or 2) humans simultaneously have a big footprint on climate and little or no effect on global temperature, or 3) humanity is the common cause accounting for the increase in both solar output and climate.

None of these three options are plausible. Again, your views are incoherent.

Look, I don’t doubt that there is a pretty large human footprint on the environment, and on our climate, too.

And yet you go on to say….

But at the end of the day, a century from now, our climate is going to look broadly like it looks right now. Our crops are going to grow broadly the way they grow now. The seacoast is going to look broadly the way it looks now.

So there’s a pretty large human footprint, but you confidently predict that the footprint could never become large enough to actually make any difference. That makes no sense.

Our climate is already visibly different right now than it was when our parents were born (a point you seem to concede with the “large footprint” admission), but you think that it’s going to stop changing between now and a century from now. Your position is incoherent.

What I doubt is that some C-student failed politician is the Messiah, come to save us all from the evils of tailpipe smoke.

Has anyone on this thread before you even mentioned Gore, let alone call him the Messiah?

The difficulty with the strong AGW scenario posited by those who seek political gain on the issue (which, in fairness, is not an exact match with the group that does research on climate) is that to buy the hysteria, you have to discount too much other data. Solar activity, past glacial activity, historical ice sheet levels, and so on – the more you learn about this stuff, the more dishonest and shrill the anthropogenic advocacy crowd sounds.

“Shrillness” is a term that right-wingers use to dismiss arguments they are unable to address with logic or evidence. It’s an ad hom, nothing more.

“Hysteria” is begging the question. It’s only “hysteria” if concerns about future large-scale damage caused by climate-change are scientifically implausible. I don’t think such claims are implausible, however.

It doesn’t take much time to see that the scientific literature – and also many of the respondents to “global warming skeptics,” – do indeed discuss and account for “solar activity, past glacial activity, historical ice sheet levels” and so on; your claim that they ignore these factors is either ignorant or dishonest.

Nobody has presented any evidence with a fraction of the credibility I would need to see before I would take any action to shrink economies and limit the ability of people to improve their lives here and now.

The evidence for global warming is extremely convincing to the vast majority of qualified climate scientists. There is no way to absolutely prove any future event other than waiting for it to become a past event; however, the fact that the future cannot be proved with total certainty shouldn’t prevent us from making sacrifices to avoid a catastrophe that, while not utterly certain, is scientifically plausible.

It is entirely plausible that doing nothing to significantly mitigate human-caused climate change will in fact cause much more damage to economies and lives than taking strong steps to reduce global warming will.

What conclusion am I supposed to draw?

That the source of the “consensus” claim has an agenda.

Reading this exchange caused me to go back and follow the original link you provided.

And here’s an article claiming, plausibly if not demonstrably, that the “consensus” is basically the result of global warming scientific activists ignoring all the research that propose alternative causal mechanisms.

Actually, the skeptics quoted in the article you link to demonstrably lie about the Science magazine article they’re criticizing. From the article you cite:

“So how did the results published in Science achieve a 100 percent level of conformity? Regrettably, the article does not include any reference to the [unpublished?] study itself, let alone the methodology on which the research was based. This makes it difficult to check how Oreskes arrived at the truly miraculous results,” he added.

That’s a total lie. The Science article in question explained the methodology very clearly:

That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords “climate change.”

The method used by Science is easily reproducible – virtually anyone with access to a research campus library can do a search of the ISI database (it changed its name sometime recently, but it’s still available). If the Science author lied (or was mistaken) about her results, that would have been extremely easy for skeptics to prove. All it would take is a single citation – but no such citation is present in your link.

That your link blatantly lies about the Science article while accusing the article’s author of Stalinism, should give you pause about the seriousness and credibility of your sources.

(For example, the fact that solar output and global temperature are tightly correlated – and solar output has been up precisely as the warming has occurred.)

As far as I can tell, this is simply not true if by “the warming” you’re referring to recent decades, Robert. (See this paper (pdf link) for further discussion). Can you provide a link to a serious source backing up your claim (“serious” defined as including citations to legitimate peer-reviewed scientific publications, combined with a lack of accusations that opponents are engaging in Stalinism)?

According to this post at Real Climate, Knud Lasson, the scientist who first suggested that global warming was a result of solar trends, has more recently argued that solar trends cannot explain recent global warming (P. Thejll and K. Lassen, 2000: Solar forcing of the Northern hemisphere land airtemperature: New data. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-terrestrial Physics, Vol. 62 (13),1207-1213).

The analysis needs to be repeated using a sufficient number of loci randomly chosen from the polymorphic part of the genome to be representative of it in it’s entirety.

That remark makes me look even more ignorant than I am. The genome, of course is the aggregate of all the genetic information within the cell, mostly the Chromosomes but also sundries such as mitochondrial DNA, satelite DNA, and goodness knows what else. Polymorphic loci are distributed thoughout these sites. I did not intend to imply that one could identify a ‘part’ of the genome where loci are polymorphic, and another ‘part’ where they are not. I meant that the loci should be chosen randomly from the subset of all loci known to be polymorphic.

“Polymorphism” is not also not a simple binary concept. Theoretically, a locus is polymorphic if there is more than one (known) allele found in at least one individual. In practice, it is not considered polymorphic if one allele accounts for more than a certain percentage of the population, perhaps 99%.

However, an locus in which the most common allele appears in, say, 98% of the human population is not going to be very discriminatory, even if it is regarded as ‘polymorphic’. A locus which splits, say 60/39/1% between three alleles will be less discriminatory than one which splits 60/30/10%, etc. Clearly we need a measure of how discriminating a locus could be, and choose from only those loci above a certain threshold.

I don’t know whether this has been done.

Since I wrote the above, I have found this study, which addresses most of my conserns. Although I would still like to know more about how the loci were chosen, (and, for that matter, how the test subjects were chosen), all in all, I find this to be a very impressive paper.

The analysis needs to be repeated using a sufficient number of loci randomly chosen from the polymorphic part of the genome to be representative of it in it’s entirety. I don’t know whether this has been done.”

Herein lies much of the problem with these “race scientists.” What they do is start from the social constructs we already have rather than being the objective scientists that they claim to be. There is no doubt in my mind that certain genes are more common in certain places. Thousands of years of evolution will affect survivable traits, but that doesn’t not coincide with racial categories.

Then they use things like IQ and argue heritability of intelligence based on IQ scores, which are not genes, which is another one of my beefs. Moreover, their findings usually tend to coincide with social stereotypes.

That the source of the “consensus” claim has an agenda.

Look, I don’t doubt that there is a pretty large human footprint on the environment, and on our climate, too. What I doubt is that some C-student failed politician is the Messiah, come to save us all from the evils of tailpipe smoke. I don’t doubt that there is good scientific research indicating the direction our technologies ought to move to mitigate that impact. What I doubt is that the same regulatory regime that has been touted as the cure for global cooling, the population explosion, and now global warming, is the answer to any question other than “how can a bunch of retreaded socialists finally see their dreams of state economic control come to pass”.

The difficulty with the strong AGW scenario posited by those who seek political gain on the issue (which, in fairness, is not an exact match with the group that does research on climate) is that to buy the hysteria, you have to discount too much other data. Solar activity, past glacial activity, historical ice sheet levels, and so on – the more you learn about this stuff, the more dishonest and shrill the anthropogenic advocacy crowd sounds.

That skepticism probably leads me too far in the opposite direction sometimes. But at the end of the day, a century from now, our climate is going to look broadly like it looks right now. Our crops are going to grow broadly the way they grow now. The seacoast is going to look broadly the way it looks now. Nobody has presented any evidence with a fraction of the credibility I would need to see before I would take any action to shrink economies and limit the ability of people to improve their lives here and now.

Within climatology there is, as you observe a range of respectable opinion, with many strong proponents of the theory, and some people dissenting from that view. By ‘respectable opinion’ I mean the opinions of climatologists and specialists in closely related fields, such as metrology. I don’t mean botanists or economists or particle physists.

Within that range of opinion, there will be a centre of mass. By ‘concensus’ I mean a clustering of opinion around that centre of mass. I do not mean unanimity.

From the Lindzen essay you cited:

Why, one might wonder, is there such insistence on scientific unanimity on the warming issue? After all, unanimity in science is virtually nonexistent on far less complex matters. Unanimity on an issue as uncertain as “global warming” would be surprising and suspicious.

Lindzer is indeed a top man, but it’s you, Robert, who is “insisting on unanimity” here, by arguing that “he says “no”. And that’s enough to blow away the consensus”.

In the same paragraph Linzen goes on to make another worthwhile point.

Moreover, why are the opinions of scientists sought regardless of their field of expertise? Biologists and physicians are rarely asked to endorse some theory in high energy physics. Apparently, when one comes to “global warming,” any scientist’s agreement will do.

That cuts both ways, of course. Who the hell is David Bellamy that his opinions on the matter ever carried any weight? (In a remarkable coincidence, “Global Warming” is today’s featured article on Wikipedia. Of course I wouldn’t cite WP for anything of substance. It’ll do to show who Bellamy is.)

Lindzen’s remarks are ironic though, in that he himself appears to give more weight to the “National Research Council['s] panel [which] had no members of the academy expert in climate. Indeed, it had only one scientist directly involved in climate”, than he gives to the ” Working Group I report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” with its “Approximately 150 scientists” contributing.

With respect to your other cite, I’m not sure what your point is.

Premiss: A Social Scientist claimd in an essay that there is a unanimity of opinion in the field.
Premiss: A Scientific magazine published the essay.
Premiss: The claim is bunk.

What conclusion am I supposed to draw? That the Social Scientist is discredited? That the magazine is discredited? That Scientific Magazines in general are discredited? That Global Warming is Bunk? What?

Edited for link borking.